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"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

Energy storage in the United States is expected to triple in 2019 according to Climate Action. That makes for a great headline, but what does it mean? Let’s begin by defining what energy storage is and why it’s important.

Types Of Energy Storage

Electricity is an enigma. We know what it can do, we know how to make it, we know how to control it, but there is not one person living today who can tell us what it is. Some scientists think it is a wave, some think it is made up of tiny particles, some think it is both.

What we do know is that unless it is stored in some fashion, it must be used as soon as it is created or it will be wasted. The oldest method of storing electricity is called pumped hydro. Here’s how it works.

Pumped Hydro

Excess electricity is used to pump a large quantity of water uphill into a holding pond. Later, the water is allowed to flow downhill to a reservoir below, spinning turbine blades to generate electricity along the way.

The process is about as high tech as a brick but it is simple and effective. It does require a lot of open territory with great deal of elevation change, so it is not suitable for use in many parts of the world.

Other Energy Storage Techniques

There are many other ways to store electricity ranging from the dead simple to the extremely complex. A California company proposes to build a railroad to nowhere. A train of electrically powered boxcars filled with cement would churn their way uphill in the day time using excess electrical energy. At night when the supply of solar power decreases, the train would roll back downhill. At that point, the electric motors that pushed it uphill during the day would reverse their role and generate electricity on the way down.

Other ideas include a tower that stacks concrete filled barrels on an elevated platform during the day. Later, lowering them back to ground level would generate more electricity.

Both systems use sound scientific principles that convert energy into work and then later reverse the process to make more electricity. Despite being possible, neither has shown itself to be price competitive with battery storage.

Concentrated solar power plants do not harvest the light of the sun. Instead, the capture the heat contained in sunlight and use it to warm a storage medium such as salt or silicon. Later, that heat is used to heat water to make steam that drives conventional generators that make electricity.

One experimental system heats silicon until it glows white hot. That light is then used to create electricity using solar panels. Once again, the so-called “sun in a box” concept is physically possible but not yet price competitive with battery storage.

Battery Storage

The most common form of electrical storage today is lithium ion batteries. While they may feature several different battery chemistries, they are essentially the same as the battery cells used in electric vehicles.

The driving factor that makes this type of storage preferred is that the cost of lithium ion battery cells continues to decrease as more and more of them are manufactured.

Another type of energy storage is known as a flow battery. It features two large tanks separated by a membrane. One liquid has a positive charge, the other a negative charge, Flow batteries have one advantage over lithium ion batteries — to add more capacity, simply make the tanks larger.

China is pushing forward with plans to install more flow batteries but in the US, lithium ion batteries are the storage medium of choice largely because they are the least expensive choice.

US EnergyStorage Booming

A new report from the Energy Storage Association and GTM Research says battery storage in the US grew by 27% in 2018 with 431 megawatt-hours installed.

But here’s where things get interesting. ESA and GTM Research predict 2019 will see triple that amount installed — 1,233 megawatt-hours with a combined value of more than $1 billion.

Things get even better from there. By 2023, they expect the US market for battery storage to soar to $3.8 billion helped by “falling costs and favorable policies” on the state level, according to Ravi Manghani at GTM Research.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA says “policies and regulatory frameworks that level the playing field will further encourage energy storage deployment throughout 2018 and beyond as the industry builds toward a goal of realizing 35 GW by 2025.”

Graph from GTM, via Woods Mackenzie

Time Shifting

What makes battery storage so valuable is its ability to save electricity generated now to be used later. That’s a big deal because solar panels work best during the day but begin to lose power as the sun sets — just when people are getting home from work and starting turning on appliances like air conditioning and electronic devices.

If if were not for batteries, much of that solar energy would be wasted. The same goes for wind power. Often wind turbines generate more electricity than needed at some times of day. With batteries, that excess energy can be stored for use later.

Frequency Stabilization

Another important characteristic of battery storage is the ability to react in milliseconds to the tiny variations in the frequency of the electricity flowing through the electrical grid. In most of the US, the electricity supplied by utility companies oscillates 60 times a second.

Motors, computers, and other digital devices can be damaged if the frequency is allowed to vary by as little as 1%. Batteries can absorb excess frequency changes or supplement the grid if the frequency drops too low.

Falling Prices For Energy Storage

The cost of battery storage is accelerating the demand for battery storage. And that is driving a sea change in the utility industry. Unthinkable just a few years ago, building new wind and solar farms coupled with battery storage is now less expensive than constructing new generating facilities powered by natural gas. They are also less expensive that continuing to operate nuclear or coal powered plants.

In the utility industry, investments often take 3 to 4 decades to pay off. The idea of closing down existing facilities in favor of new renewable plus storage options means trillions of dollars in existing investments are at risk. No wonder there is strong resistance to renewables plus storage by some utility companies anxious to protect their existing 🦕🦖 facilities.But price will win out and the lower the price of renewables plus storage gets, the sooner those existing 🦕🦖 facilities will be retired whether is is convenient for their owners or not.

This article is supported by InterSolar. Intersolar North America, North America’s premier exhibition and conference, is the perfect place to explore the megatrends driving the solar industry first. It’s the industry hotspot to discover the latest trends in photovoltaics, PV production technologies and solar heating and cooling. Co-located with ees North America, Intersolar North America sit at the cross-section of solar technology, energy storage, and smart renewable energy.

Agelbert NOTE: The comments section to the above article is quite lively. Some advocates of Hydrogen gas storage weighed in. Some fossil fuelers weighed in claiming "natural" (LOL!) fracked gas stored in caverns or whatever is "cheaper" than pumped hydro storage. That's a bold face lie simply because it fails to ADD to the costs of Fracked CH4 the subsidies we-the-people are coerced out of AND the pollution costs we-the-people get stuck with. All those costs are ABSENT with pumped storage.

As to Renewable Energy generated Hydrogen gas storage, though it is not polluting, it is not economically feasable on a large scale (which is how Renewable Energy energy storage MUST be scaled for a 100% plus Renwable Energy powered civilization), for reasons I outlined in a comment I made (see below).

Quote

freedomev > Matthew YoungNo they haven't stored H2 underground. Why? Please show examples?And yes so much NG seeps away it's HG effect is as bad as coal.And H2 is 100x smaller and even seeps through steel.And why do you think there is no natural H2?Because it is very reactive and bonds with many things. Thus why there is NG but no natural H2.The H2 either became methane/HCs, water or rock.

Quote

Ed Golla > freedomevHydrogen is not very reactive at all at ambient temperatures. There is natural Hydrogen in the atmosphere. Of course it is only about 1/2 part per million. Hydrogen is not in the atmosphere to any great extent because it speed is so great that it is able to escape from the earth's gravity at the upper limits of the earth's atmosphere.

agelbert > Ed Golla

The reactivity of Hydrogen gas is not the main issue with the effective storage of hydrogen gas as a form of energy for quick use.

The main issue is that Hydrogen gas molecules are smaller than any molecules in the container they are stored in (unless you can lower the temperature so much that the H2 becomes liquid - which uses enormous amounts of energy to do).

At ambient temperatures, the Hydrogen gas will percolate through metal or salt or even the densest of soils. Metal containers (see Nuclear power plant Tritium woes) degrade from Hydrogen gas caused embrittlement within a few years.

Pumped storage is, at present, the cheapest and most reliable method of storing electrical energy.

If the following type of system I learned about (in a January 18, 2018 Spiegel article) was adopted worldwide, the 100% Renewable Energy economy, including transportation, would quickly become a reality:

Hydrogen gas, in liquid form, is the best type of rocket fuel. It has the highest energy density of any rocket fuel, but it can never compete with pumped storage for infrastructure energy demands.

Much progress is being made. Battery banks like the one Tesla is marketing will have their place in the 100% Renewable Energy economy, although I believe pumped storage, with giant rock pistons over a giant cylinder of water underground, as shown above, will be more prevalent. We need fossil fuels like a dog needs ticks, no matter what the denier naysayers say.

On 29 November 2018 Energy Futures Lab and the Dyson School of Design Engineering hosted Professor Donald Sadoway of MIT to discuss the impact the liquid metal battery could have on the future of gridscale energy storage.

Abstract

Massive-scale electricity storage would offer huge benefits to today’s grid, reducing price volatility, improving stability against loss of power, increasing utilization of generation assets by enabling us to design towards average demand instead of peak demand, and deferring the costs of upgrading existing transmission lines. When it comes to tomorrow’s grid, storage is key to widespread integration of renewables, i.e., solar and wind, which due to their inherent intermittency present challenges for contribution to base load.

Comprising two liquid metal electrodes and a molten salt electrolyte, the liquid metal battery offers colossal current capability and long service lifetime at very low cost, i.e., the price point of the electricity market. The round-trip efficiency of these batteries is greater than 80% under daily 4 h discharge (C/4). Fade rates of 0.00009%/cycle have been measured which means retention of of more tahn 99% of initial capacity after 10 years of daily cycling at full depth of discharge. There is much to be learned from the innovative process that led to the discovery of disruptive battery technology.

Biography

Donald R. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science, M.A.Sc. in Chemical Metallurgy, and Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy are all from the University of Toronto. He joined the MIT faculty in 1978. The author of over 170 scientific papers and holder of 28 U.S. patents, his research is directed towards the development of rechargeable batteries as well as environmentally sound technologies for metals extraction.

He is the founder of two companies, Ambri and Boston Metal. Online videos of his chemistry lectures hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare extend his impact on engineering education far beyond the lecture hall. Viewed 1,800,000 times, his TED talk is as much about inventing inventors as it is about inventing technology. In 2012 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

The investment is large by the standards of most startups, but it’s in keeping with the capital costs Energy Vault will face in scaling up its technology.

JEFF ST. JOHN AUGUST 15, 2019

Building toward the future.

Energy Vault, the Swiss-U.S. startup that says it can store and discharge electrical energy through a super-sized concrete-and-steel version of a child’s erector set, has landed a $110 million investment from Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund to take its technology to commercial scale.

Energy Vault, a spinout of Pasadena-based incubator Idealab and co-founded by Idealab CEO and billionaire investor Bill Gross, unstealthed in November with its novel approach to using gravity to store energy.

Simply put, Energy Vault plans to build storage plants — dubbed “Evies” — consisting of a 35-story crane with six arms, surrounded by a tower consisting of thousands of concrete bricks, each weighing about 35 tons.

This plant will “store” energy by using electricity to run the cranes that lift bricks from the ground and stack them atop of the tower, and “discharge” energy by reversing that process. It’s a mechanical twist on the world’s most common energy storage technology, pumped hydro, which “stores” energy by pumping water uphill, and lets it fall to spin turbines when electricity is needed.

CEO and co-founder Robert Piconi said in a November interview with GTM that the standard array would deliver 4 megawatts/35 megawatt-hours of storage, which translates to nearly 9 hours of duration — the equivalent of building the tower to its height, and then reducing it to ground level. It can be built on-site in partnership with crane manufacturers and recycled concrete material, and can run fully automated for decades with little deterioration, he said.

And the cost, which Piconi pegged in the $200 to $250 per kilowatt-hour range, with room to decline further, is roughly 50 percent below the upfront price of the conventional storage market today, and 80 percent below it on levelized cost, he said.

The result, according to Wednesday’s statement, is a technology that could allow “renewables to deliver baseload power for less than the cost of fossil fuels 24 hours a day.”

Wednesday’s announcement builds on a recent investment from Mexico's Cemex Ventures, the corporate venture capital unit of building materials giant Cemex, along with a promise of deployment support from Cemex's strategic network. Piconi said in November that the company had sufficient investment from two funding rounds to carry it through initial customer deployments, though he declined to disclose figures.

This is the first energy storage investment for Vision Fund, the $100 billion venture fund set up by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. While large by startup standards, it’s in keeping with the capital costs that Energy Vault will face in scaling up its technology to meet its commitments. Those include a 35 megawatt-hour order with Tata Power Company, the energy-producing arm of the Indian industrial conglomerate, first unveiled in November, as well as plans to demonstrate its first storage tower in northern Italy in 2019.

For Vision Fund, it’s also an unusual choice for a storage investment, given that the vast majority of venture capital in the industry today is being directed toward lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are limited in terms of how many hours they can provide cost-effectively, with about 4 hours being seen as the limit today.

The search for long-duration energy storage has driven investment into flow batteries, compressed-air energy storage and variations on gravity-based storage, including a previous startup backed by Gross and Idealab, Energy Cache, whose idea of using a ski lift carrying buckets of gravel up a hill to store energy petered out with a 50-kilowatt pilot project.

CNBC InternationalPublished on May 2, 2019Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada is expected to be the largest building in the world by footprint once completed. CNBC’s Uptin Saiidi gets a rare look inside what Tesla founder Elon Musk calls, ‘the machine that builds the machine.’